"As I grow older I see clearly and distinctly what is right and wrong in our way of life and how ridiculous is everything not achieved with one's own blood and one's own soul and everything not infused with love." -- Marc Chagall

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Anyways, the ILR contains an interesting interview (April 16, 2008) with Chekov Feeney about the introduction of a Press Council to review complaints by the Irish general public regarding 'bad' press.

Obviously, they'll be swamped.

But how will they actually deal with such complaints, and how effective will the Press Council be in maintaining a watchdog role over the use and abuse of the Irish press? (Damn. I feel like a Trotskyist writing a blurb for a public meeting.) More importantly, can a campaign be initiated to send David Flint to Ireland? With signed copies of Her Majesty at 80: Impeccable Service in an Indispensable Office?

A more recent article in the ILR reviews David Graeber's upcoming book Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (AK Press, 2007). Graeber is an anarchist and an anthropologist, whose previous titles include Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004; available for download as a PDF) which I thought was -- rather like the Housemartins -- quite good. (And "If Liking Them Is Wrong I Don't Want To Be Right...".) The review is, in turn, taken from the blog, Counago & Spaves: Unpopular Culture for Heretics and Infidels, which is also, ah, really quite good. (I remember them from such financial adventures as Blogshares.com.)

Where was I?

Oh yeah...

On Possibilities:

In this collection, David Graeber revisits questions raised in his popular book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Employing an unpretentious style to convey complex ideas, these twelve essays cover a lot of ground: the origins of capitalism, the history of European table manners, love potions and gender in rural Madagascar, the phenomenology of giant puppets at street protests, and much more. But they're linked by a clear purpose: to explore the nature of social power and the forms that resistance to it have taken—or might take in the future.

In the best anthropological tradition, Graeber uses rich ethnographic and historical detail to support and illuminate broad insights into human nature and society. In the process, he shows how scholarly concerns can be of use to radical social movements, and how the perspectives of such movements shed new light on debates within the academy.

On the interview with Chekov, in it he makes mention of a new book, Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, a casually horrifying look at the news media in the UK, which "describes, in meticulous detail, exactly how the press comes to publish the propaganda of the powerful". Curiously, the interview with Chekov also links to the blog Leftwrites, and refers to the arrest of two very patriotic (sadly) gentlemen in the UK, Robert Cottage and David Bolus Jackson aka 'The Friendly Dentist' (below):

In October of 2006, two men were arrested in Lancashire, with the biggest cache of chemical explosives ever discovered in Britain, along with a rocket launcher, crossbow and bomb-making instructions. Both were linked to the BNP, with one of the men [Cottage] having been a candidate just a few months before. This event attracted not one single word of coverage in the national British press-with just a few brief stories in the local press-compared to the saturation coverage of several false-alarms involving Islamic people.

The situation in Australia is, of course, quite similar, as reflected in the experience of Brisbane doctor Mohamed Haneef. In fact:

Earlier this month, it was revealed that 14 Australian Federal Police (AFP) personnel are still working on the terrorism case against Indian Muslim doctor Mohamed Haneef, even though the only charge against the former Gold Coast Hospital registrar was dropped more than eight months ago. Nine officers remain assigned to the case full-time, with another five providing assistance “periodically”, the AFP said in answer to a question in a Senate estimates committee on April 3.

A second man, David Jackson, 62, a dentist, was also charged with conspiracy to cause explosions but was cleared after the jury twice failed to reach verdicts.

A BNP spokesman said after sentencing that the prosecution had been brought for political reasons. "We're not condoning it, but it's a quid pro quo to appease the Muslims," said Dr Phil Edwards, of the BNP.

"To keep them quiet, we'll snatch someone from white society. We certainly don't support the bloke. We condemn all forms of violence ... but I wouldn't have thought you could do any harm with what he had."

Dr Edwards said Cottage would not be standing as a candidate for the BNP again. "We never have anyone in the party with criminal convictions," he said, because "lefties and people on your newspaper" would publicise the fact.

As for Lazarus, he's been resurrected by Aleksandar Hemon in his new novel The Lazarus Project, reviewed by David Leavitt in The Washington Post (April 27, 2008):

At the heart of The Lazarus Project is a true story: On March 2, 1908, Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Eastern European Jewish immigrant and the survivor of an Easter 1903 pogrom in the village of Kishinev, knocked on the door of George Shippy, the Chicago chief of police. Their encounter culminated with Shippy shooting and killing Lazarus, whom he claimed was an anarchist.

Hemon imagines that a hundred years later, a non-Jewish Bosnian immigrant named Brik, who works in Chicago as a teacher and journalist, wins a grant to do research for a book on Lazarus. His plan, he says, is to "follow Lazarus all the way back to the pogrom in Kishinev, to the time before America. I needed to reimagine what I could not retrieve; I needed to see what I could not imagine."

...

The structure of The Lazarus Project is ingenious. Alternating chapters give us the story of Lazarus's killing (the story Brik is writing) and the story of Brik's own journey in search of Lazarus. Then, as the novel progresses, these narratives begin, eerily, to merge. Characters from Brik's life -- or versions of them -- show up in Lazarus's story. Even Brik himself makes a brief appearance. It's a conceit that Hemon justifies through a series of meditations on the idea of resurrection that Lazarus, by his very name, evokes. Art is resurrection, but so is history, a point that Hemon drives home when he notes (ruefully) the 1908 newspaper editorials bemoaning "the weak laws that allowed the foreign anarchist pestilence to breed parasitically on the American body politic. The war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror -- funny how old habits never die."

Well, not until the state is destroyed anyways. And of course, in the meantime, the war on anarchism -- and the anarchist war on the triple yoke of capital, state, and patriarchy -- continues.

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About Me

Andy is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker in the National University, a Jew in Nazi Germany, an ombudsman in the Defense Ministry, a communist in the post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio... A pacifist in Bosnia, a housewife alone on Saturday night in any neighborhood in any city in Mexico, a striker in the CTM, a reporter writing filler stories for the back pages, a single woman on the subway at 10 pm, a peasant without land, an unemployed worker... an unhappy student, a dissident amid free market economics, a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains of southeast Mexico. So Andy is a human being, any human being, in this world. Andy is all the exploited, marginalized and oppressed minorities, resisting and saying, 'Enough'!
[NB. Andy is also a bogan saying "Pies in 2009!", and has a NEW! IMPROVED! blog here : http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com]